The OIG outlined a two-week report from the beginning of the month on
the detention of Unaccompanied Alien Children. According to DHS IG John
Roth’s memo to DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson, the IG office continues to
make unannounced site visits to numerous detention centers along the
southern border where Customs and Border Protection (CBP) are
temporarily sheltering UACs.

“Many UAC and family units require treatment for communicable
diseases, including respiratory illnesses, tuberculosis, chicken pox,
and scabies,” the IG report said. “UAC and family unit illnesses and
unfamiliarity with bathroom facilities resulted in unsanitary conditions
and exposure to human waste in some holding facilities.” The report
continued:

Contract cleaners and OHS employees are working to maintain
sanitary conditions. DHS employees reported exposure to communicable
diseases and becoming sick on duty.For example, during a recent site
visit to the Del Rio USBP Station and Del Rio Port of Entry, CBP
personnel reported contracting scabies, lice, and chicken pox. Two CBP
Officers reported that their children were diagnosedwith chicken pox
within days of the CBP Officers’ contact with a UAC who had chicken pox.
In addition, USBP personnel at the Clint Station and Santa Teresa
Station reported that they were potentially exposed to tuberculosis.

A senior spokesman for the CDC told Marc Siegel at Slate.com
that HHS is spearheading medical services for facilities in southwest
Texas and Arizona. According to Slate, it takes two to three weeks “for a
vaccine to confer protection, [so] more cases of flu are likely within
the centers. It is also possible that the disease will spread to the
local community and beyond.”

Investigators
said in addition to looking at the old complaints, they made 87
unannounced visits to 63 sites including border entry points, Border
Patrol checkpoints, holding facilities where children are being kept and
the new facility in New Mexico specifically designed to detain illegal
immigrant families.

They found no evidence of misconduct, and none of the children they randomly interviewed reported problems, the IG said." via Mark Levin show

"The Israel-Hamas
conflict has laid bare thenew divides of the Middle East," says
Danielle Pletka, vice president of foreign and defense policy studies at
the American Enterprise Institute. "It's no longer the Muslims against
the Jews. Now it's the extremists -- theMuslim Brotherhood, Hamas,
Hezbollah, and their backers Iran, Qatar and Turkey[and the US, UN, and EU] -- against Israel
and the more moderate Muslims includingJordan, Egypt, and Saudi
Arabia."

"It's a proxy war for control or dominance in the Middle East," says CNN's Fareed Zakaria.

To understand why and what all this means, we need to begin with understanding of Hamas.

Hamas, which has
controlled the Palestinian government in Gaza for years, is an extension
of the Muslim Brotherhood. To many Americans, the brotherhood is
familiar for its central role in the power struggle for Egypt. But it's
much larger than that.

"The Muslim Brotherhood
is international, with affiliated groups in more than 70 countries,
including Saudi Arabia and the UAE," says Eric Trager of the Washington
Institute for Near East Policy.

The Arab Spring showed
the region that uprisings can lead to the Brotherhood gaining power. So
it's a threat to the governments it opposes.

"From the perspective of
Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the UAE and some other Arab states, what
the Israeli Prime Minister is doing is fighting this war against Hamas
on their behalf so they can finish the last stronghold of the Muslim
Brotherhood," Younes says.

"Arab governments and
official Arab media have all but adopted the Israeli viewof who is a
terrorist and who is not. Egyptian and Saudi-owned media are liberal in
labeling the Muslim Brotherhood as 'terrorists' and describing Hamas as a
'terrorist organization.' It's a complete turnabout from the past, when
Arab states fought Israel and the U.S. in the international
organizations on the definition of terrorism, and who is a terrorist or a
'freedom fighter.'"

Egypt

Egypt's new President vowed during his campaign that he would finish off
the Muslim Brotherhood. Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the former military
chief, deposed Egypt's first freely elected leader, President Mohamed
Morsy of the Muslim Brotherhood, last year following mass protests
against Morsy's rule. El-Sisi was elected officially in June.

Egypt also has another
reason to stand against Hamas: rising violence and instability in Sinai,
the northern part of Egypt that borders Israel and Gaza. Hamas' network
of tunnels includes some in and out of Egypt used to smuggle goods
include weapons for attacks on Israeli civilians.

The new Egyptian government has been "cracking down aggressively since it removed the brotherhood from power," Trager says.

Egypt proposed a
cease-fire, and Israel quickly accepted it -- indicating that it
contained the terms Israel was looking for, analysts say. Hamas rejected
it. While Egypt has worked furiously to try to broker a truce in the
past, Cairo this time shows little rush to change its proposal to one
much more favorable to Hamas, analysts say.

Saudi Arabia, UAE, Jordan

The monarchies of Saudi
Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Jordan have called on Hamas to
accept the cease-fire proposal as is.

"We condemn the Israeli aggression and we support the Egyptian cease-fire proposal," Jordan's King Abdullah said last week.

Countries such as Saudi
Arabia and the UAE are "challenged by Islamists who come to power via
the ballot box rather than through royal succession," says Trager.

"So these countries have
been directly supportive of the coup in Egypt because it removed
elected Islamists and therefore discredited that model."

"The Saudis and the Egyptians are now more scared of Islamic fundamentalism than they are of Israel," says Zakaria.

"The Saudi monarchy is
more worried about the prospects of Hamas winning, which would embolden
Islamists in other parts of the Middle East, and therefore potentially
an Islamist opposition in Saudi Arabia."

Qatar also funds many
Muslim Brotherhood figures in exile, including Hamas political leader
Khaled Mashaal, who is believed to have orchestrated numerous Hamas
terrorist attacks.

"I think this is a case
of a country with a lot of money to burn making a certain calculation in
2011 that made a lot of sense at the time: that the Brotherhood was the
next big thing that was going to dominate many of the countries of the
region," says Trager. "Realistically, it made sense to bet on it."

But that changed. In 2012, Meshaal left Syria
as the country's civil war deepened -- a decision believed to have
caused a breakdown in his relationship with Iran as well, says Firas Abi
Ali, head of Middle East and North Africa Country Risk and Forecasting
at the global information company IHS. Tehran is aligned with Syrian
President Bashar al-Assad's regime.

Now, Syria -- Israel's neighbor to the north -- is locked in a brutal, multiparty civil war, with Islamist extremists hoisting severed heads onto poles.
The war, believed to have killed more than 115,000 people, is just one
of the many developments emphasizing how many "fault lines" there are in
the region, Richard Haass, president of Council on Foreign Relations,
told "CNN Tonight."

Palestinian leader
Mahmoud Abbas, who is in charge of the government in the West Bank,
"seems politically exhausted by all the twists and turns he has made in
search of a durable solution," the Soufan Gruop says. "And the one
chance of reasserting his authority through a unity government that
would have forced Hamas into a subordinate and less militant role has
now disappeared.He must now watch helplessly as protests in the West
Bank undo whatever progress he had made towards a two-state solution." via Free Rep.

"Due to the current security situation in Tel Aviv, U.S. Embassy Tel
Aviv remains open but is operating at reduced staffing until further
notice,and has canceled routine visa application processing and
American Citizen services," the statement says. "Emergencies involving
an American citizen and visa applications will be considered on a case
by case basis."

The statement surfaces in the midst of both souring US-Israel
relations and an already-pressured visa crisis, which has seen the visa
process for Israelis grow more and more difficult over the past year.

Obama called Netanyahu while the
premier was conferring with his senior ministers about how to proceed
in Gaza. Some ministers counseled that Israel should continue to limit
our forces to specific pinpoint operations aimed at destroying the
tunnels of death that Hamas has dug throughout Gaza and into Israeli
territory.

Others argued that the only way to truly destroy the
tunnels, and keep them destroyed, is for Israel to retake control over
the Gaza Strip.

No ministers were recommending that Israel end
its operations in Gaza completely. The longer our soldiers fight, the
more we learn about the vast dimensions of the Hamas’s terror arsenal,
and about the Muslim Brotherhood group’s plans and strategy for using it
to destabilize, demoralize and ultimately destroy Israeli society.

The IDF’s discovery of Hamas’s Rosh Hashana plot was the last straw for
any Israeli leftists still harboring fantasies about picking up our
marbles and going home. Hamas’s plan to use its tunnels to send hundreds
of terrorists into multiple Israeli border communities simultaneously
and carry out a massacre of unprecedented scope, replete with the
abduction of hostages to Gaza, was the rude awakening the Left had
avoided since it pushed for Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from Gaza.

In other words, in their discussion Sunday night, Netanyahu and his
ministers were without illusions about the gravity of the situation and
the imperative of winning – however defined.

And by the way, the
eventual terms of that cease-fire must include opening Hamas-controlled
Gaza’s borders with Egypt and Israel and ending Israel’s maritime
blockade of the Gaza coast. That is, the cease-fire must allow Hamas to
rebuild its arsenal of death and destruction quickly, with US political
and financial support.

Until Obama made the call, there was
lingering doubt among some Israelis regarding his intentions. Some
thought that US Secretary of State John Kerry might have been acting of
his own accord last Friday night when he tried to force Israel to accept
Hamas’s cease-fire terms.

Sunday CNN’s Candy Crowley interviewed Deputy National Security Adviser
Ben Rhodes. She asked him what the administration thinks Israel can do
to prevent civilians from being killed in Gaza beyond what it is already
doing. Rhodes replied, “I think you can always do more.”

In
other words, Rhodes said that no matter what precautions Israel takes to
try to minimize Palestinian civilian deaths in Gaza, the administration
will never be satisfied. The White House will never acknowledge that
Israel is in the right, or that it is fighting a moral war against a
barbaric foe.

And since the administration will never be satisfied,
Israel can expect to be condemned by various UN bodies, including the
Security Council,because no matter what it doesto try to earn the
support of the administration, it will never receive such support.

The discovery that the Obama administration is entirely in Hamas’s
corner hit all of Israel hard. But it hit the Left the hardest. Few on
the Right, which recognized Obama’s hostility from the outset of his
presidency, were surprised.

As for political leaders, the
government cannot risk giving the administration justification for its
anti-Israel policies, so senior ministers have all said nothing.

Consequently, the harshest criticisms of the administration’s pro-Hamas
position were heard from quarters where rarely a peep of criticism for
Obama has been heard.

Haaretz, the far-left broadsheet that has seldom taken issue with even
the harshest rejections of Israel’s rights, went bananas after its
reporter Barak Ravid received the details of Kerry’s cease-fire
agreement. As Ravid put it, Kerry’s document, “might as well have been
penned by Khaled Mashaal.

It was everything Hamas could have hoped for.”

Ravid continued, “What Kerry’s draft spells for the internal
Palestinian political arena is even direr: It crowns Hamas and issues
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas with a death warrant.”

And
that is really the crux of the issue. The crowd at Haaretz is far more
wedded to the PLO and Mahmoud Abbas than it is to the government of
Israel. And the (Obama) administration’s support for Hamas exposed the PLO as an
irrelevance.

The Left understands that the (Obama) administration’s behavior has destroyed it.

Leftists can no longer say that Israeli territorial withdrawals will win it international support.

They can no longer say that Israel will receive US support if it places
the security of Palestinian civilians above the security of its own
civilians and military forces.

They can no longer say that the PLO is the answer.

The Israeli Left has been Obama’s ace in the hole since he first ran
for office, fresh from the pews in Jeremiah Wright’s anti-Semitic
church. They were the grease in the wheels that legitimized the
administration’s anti-Israel pressure group J Street. They were the ones
who could be counted on to tell the US media and the American Jews that
Netanyahu is to blame for Obama’s hostility.

Yet, rather than
backtrack, and try to save the Israeli Left, the (Obama) administration doubled
down on Monday, releasing a series of statements condemning the Israeli
media’s condemnations of Kerry’s pro-Hamas position.

By Monday
afternoon, the administration went so far as to say that by criticizing
Kerry, Israel’s media were endangering their country’s alliance with the
US.

And this leads us to the larger point about Obama’s foreign policy,
which his Sunday night telephone call to Netanyahu revealed. As rattled
as Israelis are over Obama’s decision to support Hamas against Israel,
Netanyahu made clear in his remarks Monday night that Israel has no
choice but to keep fighting until we defeat this barbaric enemy.

Netanyahu didn’t mention Obama, but it was obvious that he was
respectfully refusing to hand Israel’s head on a platter to Hamas’s
friend in the White House.

And while it is hard for Israel to ignore Obama, it is impossible for Americans to ignore him. He runs their foreign policy.

She is the living embodiment of the way in which ‘human rights’ have
morphed into their absolute opposite, and instead of providing a
protection against tyranny have been turned into the anvil upon which
freedom and justice are being smashed.

A supposed expert on genocide, having argued that nations have a
moral obligation to prevent it, she was asked in 2002 as a ‘thought
experiment’ what she would advise the US President to do about the
Israel-Palestinian problem‘if one party or another [starts] looking
like they might be moving toward genocide’. She responded to this
already disturbingly loaded question:

‘...what we need is a willingness to put
something on the line in helping the situation. Putting something on the
line might mean alienating a domestic constituency of
tremendous political and financial import; it may more crucially mean
sacrificing — or investing, I think, more than sacrificing — billions of
dollars, not in servicing Israel’s military, but actually investing in
the new state of Palestine,in investing the billions of
dollars it would probably take, also, to support what will have to be a
mammoth protection force, not of the old Rwanda kind, but a meaningful
military presence. Because it seems to me at this stage (and this is
true of actual genocides as well, and not just major human rights
abuses, which were seen there), you have to go in as if you’re serious,
you have to put something on the line.

‘Unfortunately, imposition of a solution
on unwilling parties is dreadful. It’s a terrible thing to do, it’s
fundamentally undemocratic. But, sadly, we don’t just have a democracy
here either, we have a liberal democracy. There are certain sets of
principles that guide our policy, or that are meant to, anyway. It’s
essential that some set of principles becomes the benchmark, rather than
a deference to [leaders] who are fundamentally politically destined to
destroy the lives of their own people. And by that I mean what Tom
Friedman has called “Sharafat.” [Sharon/Arafat] I do think in that
sense, both political leaders have been dreadfully irresponsible. And,
unfortunately, it does require external intervention’[my emphasis].

Clearly, despite the careful nods to a (disgusting) moral equivalence
Power was not talking about invading the disputed territories beyond
Israel’s borders to prevent the Palestinians from committing genocide or
major human rights abuses against Israel by wiping out the Jewish
national homeland -- an aim to which their leadership remains committed
in word and deed.

No, she was talking about invading Israel to prevent a genocide, or
major human rights abuses, (her language wasn’t clear, but the point is
the same), against the Palestinians -- something which, in any rational
universe, not only could not possibly be laid at Israel’s door but also
held out the possibility that Israel might commit atrocities against
people who themselves make Israel the victim of precisely such atrocities(and indeed, commit them regularly against other Palestinians).

She also suggested that defending Israel was not a cause that should
be dear to all Americans and indeed all decent people everywhere, nor
that the great majority of Americans do indeed thus support Israel, but
that the only people who might be alienated by invading Israel would be
American Jews who exercised tremendous political and financial power
over American politics.

Subsequently she said of these comments that she couldn’t remember what she had said and didn’t understand what she had meant.

Maybe a clue lies in what she told the New Statesman during Obama’s first presidential campaign:

‘Of course I regret them... I can’t even believe they came out of my mouth.’

Here are some of her other activities to date.

In April 2003 she signed a Statement on Cuba, initiated by the
Democratic Socialists of America member Leo Casey calling for the
lifting of trade sanctions against Cuba.

Along with Susan Rice (the former UN ambassador, now appointed
Obama’s National Security Adviser, heaven help us) and Hillary Clinton,
the former Secretary of State, Power is considered a key architect of the disastrous Libyan intervention.

And despite her advocacy of attack or invasion to prevent threatened genocides, she has sneered at
concerns about the race to build a nuclear bomb by Iran, which has
repeatedly threatened genocide against the Jews of Israel, as a figment
of the war-mongering Republican imagination.

And as for the Obama FAA diversion of all flights to Israel this
week, here’s a tip: despite the rockets falling, I’d feel safer landing
in Israel at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport than I would at any airport
in the United States. Israel, for instance, doesn’t have the laser
pointer problems. By the way, have you ever tried landing in Ukraine?
Or Nigeria? Or Yemen? Uh-huh, those places are soooooo safe. Right?

WASHINGTON, D.C. –U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, announced that hewill
hold all State Department nomineesuntil the Obama Administration
answers questions about its unprecedented decision to cancel flights to
Israel, while at the same time announcing continuing aid that will be
funneled to the terrorist organization, Hamas.

Was this a political decision driven by the White House? For
instance, who was this decision made by– a career official, a political
appointee, or someone else (at the FAA, State Department or White
House)?

If the FAA’s decision was based on airline safety, why was Israel
singled out when flights would be permitted into Afghanistan, Pakistan,
and Yemen?

What was the FAA’s ‘safety’ analysis that led to prohibiting flights
to Israel, while stillpermitting flights to Ukraine—where a commercial airline flight was just shot down with a BUK missile?

What specific communications occurred between the FAA and the White
House? And the State Department? Why were any such communications
necessary, if this was purely about airline safety?Was this a safety issue, or was it using a federal regulatory agency
to punish Israel to try to force them to comply with Secretary Kerry’s
demand that Israel stop their military effort to take out Hamas’s rocket
capacity?

Speaking
on the sidelines of the annual congress of the International Labour
Organization (ILO) -- the UN's labour agency-- Burrow said little real
action had been taken to improve labourers' working conditions. "We haven't unearthed the worst of it yet," she said.

Migrants,
mostly from South Asia, form over 90 percent of the labour force in
Qatar, where 88 percent of the population is from outside the country. Human rights campaigners Amnesty International say they are treated like "animals," with hundreds dying on construction sites. The ITUC warns that at current rates, as many as 4,000 might be killedby the time the tournament kicks off.

The
energy-rich emirate is also facing swirling claims that corruptionplayed a role in the surprise decision by world football's governing
body FIFA to name it host of the 2022 showcase. "The danger now is
that the corruption issue -- which is very serious of course -- is
going to overshadow the situation of workers on the ground," Burrow
warned.

Long-running concernshave been given fresh impetus by the World Cup drive and Qatar's breakneck economic development.Burrow said workers' living conditions in Qatar were all too often squalid, with inadequate food and medical care.

Qatar's "kafala" visa-sponsorship system handcuffs foreigners to their local employer. South
Asian workers pay middlemen huge sums to win a work permit, and fear
that complaining will mean getting fired and deported -- if their
employer even agrees to an exit visa.

"How
can we allow, as human beings, that Qatar can have a World Cup whenthey are still abusing domestic sector and contract workers," said
Myrtle Witbooi, chair of the International Domestic Workers Network. The
International Transport Federation has also filed a complaint against
Qatar Airways at the ILO over its treatment of white-collar employees."...

Hamas’ strategy since Israel left Gaza in 2005 has been exactly the
same. The media response has been exactly the same. And Hamas will
continue to employ a strategy that causes many Palestinian civilians to
die as long as the media keeps up its thoughtless body count. Here’s the way it works: Hamas deliberately fires its rockets from
densely populated civilian areas, using hospitals, disability centers,
mosques and schools as launching sites. This puts Israel to the tragic
choice of either allowing the rockets to endanger its civilians or to
destroy the rocket launchers, thereby risking civilian casualties among
Hamas’ human shields. Often Israel chooses to forgo attacking military
targets, so as not to put Palestinian civilians at risk. Sometimes it
has no choice, because the rocket fire against its civilians is
persistent. Palestinian civilians are killed despite Israel’s best
efforts precisely because Hamas wants civilians to be killed,especially
if these civilians are children, women or the elderly. Hamas stands
ready to parade these human shields in front of the media which is eager
to show the dead and count the bodies.

Hamas could easily reduce the death and injury toll among its civilians,
by simply allowing them to go underground into tunnels and shelters
which abound throughout Gaza. But Hamas has a deliberate policy of
refusing to allow civilians to enter the tunnels or shelters. They
reserve these places of refuge for their fighters and commanders, which
explains why so few Hamas fighters have been killed. If Hamas were to
reverse its policy and allow civilians into the shelters while requiring
its fighters to stay above ground, the ratio of civilians to fighters
killed would dramatically change. That is why in each of the wars
between Hamas and Israel there have been more Palestinian than Israeli
civilian deaths and injuries. It is part of Hamas’ dead baby strategy
and it works, because the media facilitates it. The media also emphasizes the fact that thus far no Israelis have been
killed by Hamas rocket fire. Indeed some media and international
organizations seem implicitly to be condemning Israel for protecting the
lives of its own citizens, by repeatedly pointing out that none have
died, while Palestinian deaths have reached nearly 200. The reason
there have been no Israeli deaths so far is because Israel spends
hundreds of millions of dollars trying to protect its civilians, while
Hamas spends its resources deliberately exposing its civilians to the
risks of Israeli counterattacks. Israel has built shelters all
throughout the country and has spent a fortune on the Iron Dome system. The results have been impressive, though many Israelis suffer from
trauma, shock and the inevitable long term consequences of being exposed
to constant rocket fire.

How many times have you heard, seen or read the body counts: nearly 200
Palestinians dead, no Israelis dead. This is usually accompanied by an
accusation that Israel is violating the international law requirement
of “proportionality.” This is a misuse of the term, which has a precise
meaning in international law that reflects a broader morality. Under
international law, a nation has the right to attack military targets.
Period!It doesn’t matter whether the rockets coming from these
launchers have as yet succeeded in their task of killing civilians. There can be no doubt under international law that rocket launchers, and
the fighters who employ them are legitimate military targets. Israel
is therefore entitled to attack these targets, even if no Israeli
civilians have been killed, so long as it can do so without causing
disproportionate civilian casualties.

This rule was not addressed to an enemy that deliberately uses human
shields to protect its military targetsand combatants against
legitimate attacks. Proportionality is not judged by the number of
civilians actually killed by Hamas rockets, but rather by the risks
posed to Israelis. These risks have been diminished, but not eliminated
by the Iron Dome system. They have also been considerably diminished
by Israel’s counterattacks on the missile launchers and those who employ
them. Without these counterattacks, it is highly likely that more
Hamas missiles would have made it through the Iron Dome system which has
been approximately 85% effective. Israel has every right under the
rules of proportionality to attack these military targets, so long as
they take reasonable efforts to reduce civilian casualties. They have
done so by leafleting, by calling, and by other methods of warning
civilians to leave target areas. Hamas leaders, on the other hand, have
urged, and sometimes compelled, their civilians to remain in harm’s way
as human shields. The media, by emphasizing the comparative body counts without providing
the reasons for the disparity, play into the hands of Hamas and encourage that terrorist organization, to continue to pursue its dead
baby strategy. So the next time those in the media promote a body count
without explanation, they should point a finger at themselves for
contributing to this deadly count.".

Comment:
Television networks and channels get well deserved credit for "death
counts" but one outlet I've listened to for many years doesn't get enough credit. I'd like to give special mention to ABC Radio Networks and the local outlets it feeds for the most vicious, hateful coverage 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for decades.